How to Build Your Instagram Following
People want high follower counts. Your small business would absolutely love a high follower count. And, we are not here to buy fake followers to make it seem like you are interesting, we are here to build a real and true following of people interested in you, your service or your product. Alright, alright, so how do we do that?
You need to be present on that account. Your followers want to see content from you (that's why they followed you!). So, you need to…
POST CONSISTENTLY
For the best results, you need to post at least once a day at times that are MOST optimal for your account. Once a day, seven days a week. That’s lovely and will help your online presence to soar and your follower count to go up. Fine, I know, that seems like a lot. We’ll settle at 5 posts per week. Deal? If that seems overwhelming, my bottom dollar is 3 posts per week. I won’t take any less.
Create a schedule, a rotation if you will, of what you are going to post. AND, why you are going to post it. For promotional and marketing purposes? For follower engagement? Make a plan. One post that you WILL INCLUDE in this weekly schedule is a photo of you. My dear, people follow people. I can almost promise you that when you look at your insights (I’ll talk more about analytics soon) your top posts will be the ones of you and your lovely face. So, say cheese.
There are a number of platforms that can assist you in scheduling and posts of your stories and feed posts in advance. Sit down on a Sunday and plan your content for the week! Check out Tailwind (my personal fav) and Later.
USE HASHTAGS & KEYWORDS
Hashtags are way less important than they once were. But, they a tool and you should use them. People click and follow the hashtags related to the content that they want to see. So, basically they are a direct line to the target audience that you are looking for. Create a list of quality hashtags that are relevant to your brand and that your potential clients will interact with. We are going to steer clear of the overly vague and generalized hashtags though (for example, saying #grateful is a lovely sentiment, but has been used 28 million times and your post will get lost in a sea of other grateful folks. #gratefulheart however, has 994K posts which is much more manageable for you to actually be seen).
Instagram allows you to put 30 hashtags on a post. There has been constant changes and debate about how many hashtags to use. Instagram themselves recommended 3-5 hashtags a while back, but really it’s up to you. Because they’re really not that important now, you may as well use as many as you can. 30 clear, brand specific, target audience relevant hashtags on all 3-7 posts of your weekly schedule. And, I know it’s not always pleasing to your aesthetic, but put them in your caption, not in a comment.
Alright, you’re killing it so far. Next, I want you to…
ENGAGE WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS
Each follower is a fan of yours. You love your fans. You are grateful to your fans and you want them to know it! If they like your post, go return the love. If they comment on your post, reply. Respond to all of your DMs, like the story replies, spread the loovvveee. Likes, comments and message responses are the heart and soul of your IG engagement.
Remember those hashtags and that target audience? Alright, good. You are going to choose a couple of those hashtags and click on them. Go on a mindful liking frenzy. Comment on posts that catch your attention. Follow the niche accounts. Spend at least ten minutes a day interacting and engaging. A simple like can get a new set of eyes to your page! Next up, the moment you have all been waiting for…
USE INSTAGRAM INSIGHTS
First things first, convert your page to a business account if you haven’t already. Your business Instagram account will give you access to the Instagram Insights. These insights are analytics available for each post and your overall page performance. This will allow you see what posts performed the best, which posts in your rotation brought on the most engagement. You can build your IG strategy from these analytics.
On each post, you will now see an option to “view insights” as well as to “promote” the post. It will also tell you if your post is doing significantly better than recent posts (and therefore, should maybe pay to promote it)! When you click on “view insights” you will be able to see:
the likes, comments, shares and saves of that post,
the number of profile visits and website clicks (the “interactions” brought on from the post),
the number accounts reached and what percentage of these accounts were not following you,
the number of follows gained from this post,
the number of “impressions” and the source of the impressions (from your profile, from the home feed, from the location post, from hashtags or other).
On your profile, you will have a fancy new “Insights” button there too. When you click that, if will give you your profiles overall analytics in comparison to either the 7 days prior or the 30 days prior. The overview will show you:
the accounts reached and percentage of growth - with a bar graph of accounts reached, the number of impressions, the account activity of profile visits and website taps (number of and growth percentage). It will also show you your top posts and top stories based on your reach,
the content interactions (number of and growth percentage) broke down into overall likes, comments, saves and shares as well as your story interactions and replies. You will also be able to see you IGTV Video Interactions if you’re a brave soul that does such a thing (which you should!). It will also show you your top posts and top stories based on interactions,
the audience - the number of followers gained and growth percentage,
finally, it will list the content you shared, posts and stories in that time frame.
Look at these analytics. Study them. What worked? What didn’t? Are you growing? Learn from them and continue to build and adjust your posting schedule accordingly. Okay, okay, you are doing great. The good news is that you can reference this post whenever needed. I know it’s a lot, but you got this. Lastly, and this one is also a biggie…
START CROSS-POSTING
Get that Instagram account across all of your other social media platforms. Let’s get all that great new content on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter pages. Link your IG to all of your other accounts, to your website and to your monthly newsletters. Put your IG handle on your business cards. Put it in your email signature. Wherever! Just shout it from the rooftops, “I HAVE A SUPER COOL INSTAGRAM PAGE WITH GREAT INFORMATION AND YOU SHOULD BUY MY PRODUCTS OR SIGN UP FOR MY SERVICES BECAUSE I TOO, AM AWESOME.”
To make this even easier, check out Repurpose.io (it’s a great small biz resource to help you cross-post). Speaking of great small biz resources, get a list of my favourite ones, here.
This will get you started on increasing that follower count. As always, my friends, we are here to grow and thrive. I want to help you. Feel free to reach out at any time, I got you.
